FIVE
IT WAS NEARLY a week before I heard from Rebecca again, and I remember that the days passed slowly, like soldiers in a gray line. During that interval, I often thought about the life my family had lived on McDonald Drive. I recalled how, when I was very small, Laura had taken me out to the swings and played with me for hours. My father had often sat in a small wrought iron chair and watched us. “Don’t swing him too high,” he would caution at those times when Laura’s natural energy would get the better of her and she’d send me hurling skyward, my feet soaring into the summer air.
There were other memories, too. I could recall my mother piddling about in the garage, moving small boxes from one place to another. She seemed always to be hunting for something small and inconsequential that eluded her again and again, a pruning fork or a spool of thread. Jamie would joke about it from time to time. “Everything she touches disappears,” he once said with a mocking grin.
There’d been a fireplace in the living room, and I remembered the sounds the fire made in the winter, along with the rhythmic thump of the axe when my father chopped wood beneath the large maple tree in the backyard.
Smells returned. Laura’s nail polish, the raincoat that Jamie often hung wet in the closet we were forced to share, my mother’s cooking, always bland and unaccented, the smell, I often thought, of little more than boiling water. And last, my father’s hands, the strange odor that always came from them, and which, one night during that week before Rebecca called again, I actually mentioned to Marie.
“Like soil,” I said suddenly, as we sat at the dinner table one evening. The words had come from nowhere but my own mind. We’d not been talking about my father, or anything even remotely connected to him.
“What are you talking about, Steve?” Marie asked.
I felt embarrassed, surprised by the level of my own distraction.
“I was thinking about my father,” I explained quickly. The odor of his hands.”
“Why were you thinking about that?”
It was the perfect chance to tell her about Rebecca, her book, the meetings I’d had, the ones I expected to have in the future. And yet, I found that I couldn’t do it.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “Sometimes, things just pop into my head. This time, it was my father.” I shrugged. “No reason.”
And so, it had begun.
It was a Thursday afternoon, and I was at the drafting table in my office at Simpson and Lowe when Rebecca called to arrange another meeting.
“It’s Rebecca Soltero,” she said.
“Yes, I know.”
“I was wondering if you might have an evening free this week?”
“Most of my evenings are free,” I told her.
She didn’t seem surprised to hear it. “Well, we could meet tonight, if you want.”
“All right.”
“Where?”
I suggested a small restaurant north of town. In the past I’d gone there alone in the late afternoon, simply to sit in the generally quiet atmosphere and have a drink before going home. At times I would do a little work, perhaps add a line or two to the drawing of the “dream house” I had been elaborating and modifying for years, and vaguely hoped to build one day. It was a house of floating levels and dreamy, translucent walls, of rooms that melted into other rooms. It was impractical and unrealizable, a structure bereft of all those mundane pillars and supporting beams without which it could not hope to stand.
She arrived promptly, carrying a black briefcase, and wearing a dark red silk blouse and a long black skirt. She’d added a bolero jacket, also black, unnecessary in the unusual warmth of that long Indian summer, but worn, I think, in order to conceal or diminish the more obvious contours of her body.
Thanks for meeting me again, Mr. Farris,” she said as she sat down.
“Steve,” I said. “It’s no trouble.” I glanced about the room. “It’s a nice place, don’t you think?”
It was a garden restaurant, made of glass and hung with vines. Small fountains sprouted here and there among the foliage.
“A sort of Garden of Eden effect,” I added.
“Yes, it’s fine,” Rebecca answered briskly.
The waitress stepped over, a young woman named Gail, with whom Wally claimed to have had a brief affair, though he probably hadn’t. I ordered a beer on tap, Rebecca a glass of red wine. Gail glanced at Rebecca, then at me. She grinned knowingly, as if privy to a secret.
“When do you have to be home?” Rebecca asked after Gail stepped away.
“Home?”
“You’re married, aren’t you? With a son?”
I nodded. “A family man,” I said, then added, “My son is nine years old. His name is Peter.”
“And your wife’s name?”
“Marie.”
